


Sole Survivor

by haruchicken



Category: Temeraire - Naomi Novik
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, talk of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 18:47:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4636218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haruchicken/pseuds/haruchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Caesar contemplates how short human life is, yet how long he himself will live being a dragon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sole Survivor

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this first as a longer story where we see Rankin get sick and Caesar dealing with the possibility of his death. Later I scraped the idea and did a shorter one.
> 
> I liked how we saw Temeraire deal with the almost certainty of Laurence's death and how he denied it so much. I wondered how Caesar would deal with it and thought he would probably be more willing to except it because he's a very practical dragon when it comes to certain things. Plus I don't think Rankin would be very delicate when explaining the life spans of humans and dragons.

It was hard for Caesar when he realized he might not have enough time, or if he was being honest with himself not enough time at all to spend with his captain. It was a strange thing to realize that someone you had known sense you hatched would not be around for the entirety of your life. That one day they would pass on into that non-descript nothingness of death long before you ever approached your own natural decay. 

The revelation started with a cough. His captain had coughed, and nothing had changed, but within days he was too sick to be outside. Stuck in his bed at the barracks, with a doctor coming and going on and off. His crew had assured him that Jeremy would be fine, but Caesar heard them whispering by the fire at night. Whispering the word pneumonia in eerie hushed voices.

It had taken his captain nearly six weeks to recuperate, and even then he looked pale. At times he still coughed, and his coat no longer fit the way it should have. Caesar saw him for the first time as a fragile thing, his life a small, delicate thing that could easily be taken away. There was nothing Caesar could do to keep his captain by his side. He could hold him in his talons all he wanted, but death would still take him one day and one day to soon.

At times he was irrationally jealous of the little dragon Temeraire had told him about. Little Levitas, who had been with his captain sense his childhood. He wanted those years for himself. He wanted that precious time. Yet he remembered his foolishness when his captain would sit with him, and in quite reserved tones tell him of Levitas. He remembered Levitas was dead and death was permanent. What was left to jealous of, but bones and memories?

His captain had told him the discrepancy in human and dragon lifespans, because the man never refused to answer a question if he asked it with a true desire to know, not even if the answer left a scar that wouldn’t heal. Through all that pain though he was grateful to know, and even more to understand, for his captain had told him once there was a great difference between knowing something and understanding it.

He wondered if Temeraire had realized his own captain’s frailty, or even perhaps Iskierka. If they too looked at their human companions and could see the end of their life as if it was already happening. Could not just know but understand how long their own life stretched in front of them and understand too that everything would be different and nothing the same. That cities would rise where there had been nothing, and places familiar would fade from existence. 

He figured probably not. That when there captains neared there end they would still be denying the outcome. Perhaps even think with all their strength they could post-pone it. But Caesar understood when he looked at his captain’s bones under his skin that human life was short and even if he did recover, that eventually he would not. That one day he would look upon his captain for the last time without even realizing it was the last time.

There would be a last conversation, a last laugh, a last argument, and eventually he probably wouldn’t even be able to recall them in all there detail. He would forget the slant of Jeremy’s noise, and the way he always ate hunched over his plate of food as if some of the crew would steal it from him when he took a meal outside. He would forget all the small things, all the things he never really noticed but made his captain the person he was. In the end he would only remember the big things.

As he watched Jeremy play cards with a group of aviators, Caesar was content knowing he could not dwell on his companions’ deaths. He realized studying their faces in the dwindling light that they too understood their lives were short but let the thoughts drift to the back of their minds. They thought about other things, like what to wear to impress a girl they fancied, or the simplest way to clean a harness strap. Death was a constant companion but that didn’t mean you had to stare at it all day waiting for it make its move.

In the end Caesar didn’t want to stare at it either. He wanted to sit and delight in the mumbling banter around the makeshift card cable, not because human lives are short and he must appreciate them while he could, but because he cared for them all in a way, and enjoyed the lovely sounds of fun they made when someone won a hand of cards. He wanted to relax and take in only what he could, and not claw desperately for every minute detail he was sure to forget anyway.

Sometimes to enjoy the time you have with people you have to forget it exists at all.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked it, even if it's kind of sad. 
> 
> I used the title of the song I listened to during my writing, Sole Survivor by Two Steps From Hell.


End file.
